Pennsylvania execution delays have created new form of punishment

Some death row inmates have spent decades in solitary confinement.

James Begley in 1995. (CISCO ADLER, YORK DAILY…)

August 04, 2012|By Riley Yates, Of The Morning Call

WAYNESBURG, Greene County — — Isaac Mitchell is an emblem of Pennsylvania's modern death penalty.

Sentenced to die for killing two men in Philadelphia in 1997, Mitchell is now 61 and ailing, confined to the infirmary at the State Correctional Institute Greene, the prison in southwest Pennsylvania where three-quarters of the state's death-row inmates are held.

Lying in a hospital bed alone in a cell, he managed a weak wave July 18 as prison officials and a Morning Call reporter stood before him during a tour in which the Department of Corrections for the first time allowed a member of the news media extensive access to death row.

Mitchell is far more likely to die of illness than of an executioner's needle. But that may be true for every one of Pennsylvania's 203 death-row inmates — even the healthy ones — given a de facto legal halt on executions in the state for all but those who abandon their appeals and volunteer for death.

"He either improves, or he'll expire in this cell," Greene corrections Capt. Wallace Leggett said of Mitchell.

At one point, death rows were way stations holding murderers in the brief period between their sentences and their executions.

But they are increasingly becoming a punishment unto themselves — one not handed down by a judge or a jury, but created incidentally as Pennsylvania and other states keep condemned prisoners in solitary confinement for years, if not decades, awaiting executions that may never be carried out.

For critics of capital punishment, the delays raise questions about whether death row is in and of itself a cruel and unusual punishment, given the severe psychological impacts that extended solitary confinement can bring.

"There's been a decent number of studies looking at isolation and how it is really torture. And that's what death row really is," said Marc Bookman, a former public defender who runs the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation in Philadelphia, which advises capital defense teams.

"It makes people mentally ill and it's the equivalent of torture," Bookman said. "I don't think we as a society should be in the torture business."

Nationally, Pennsylvania is third among states in the number of death-row inmates who have served more than 20 years, its 51 surpassed only by California's 246 and Florida's 137, a review of each state's data by The Morning Call showed.

The last person put to death against his will in Pennsylvania was in 1962. Elmo Smith of Montgomery County was electrocuted just 18 months after he was convicted of murdering and raping a schoolgirl.

In the 1990s, three inmates were executed, but only because they waived legal challenges to their sentences and asked to be put to death. That's the same number as have committed suicide while on death row since 1983 — including one in Greene — compared with the 24 who have died of natural causes, according to statistics the Department of Corrections keeps.

Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli, a death penalty backer, said that if the conditions on death row are cruel, he blames federal judges for delaying executions by entertaining lengthy appeals. It doesn't surprise Morganelli that a capital inmate "is going to go stir crazy, is going to go nuts" after years of isolation.

That the conditions are harsh was a key part of Morganelli's argument in 2011 when he won the first of two recent death-penalty verdicts in the county after nearly 25 years without one.

Michael Eric Ballard was on parole for a prior murder when he stabbed to death four people in Northampton, and Morganelli told jurors that a life sentence — the alternative — would be only a homecoming for the prison-seasoned Ballard.

"It is a very, very difficult, tough life and you have to question whether it is worse than being put to death," Morganelli said. "Though, that said, I'm always amazed that all of these guys are fighting for their lives."

Across the nation, solitary confinement is the rule, and not the exception, for capital prisoners. All but two of 35 states that have inmates facing the death penalty isolate them in single cells, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit clearinghouse. (Missouri holds them in a maximum security prison with the rest of the inmate population, while Oklahoma bunks some two to a cell.)

Psychological studies confirm that long periods of isolation can be difficult to cope with.

"We suffer from death-row syndrome. We're locked down way too much," insisted Herbert Blakeney, a Greene inmate from Harrisburg who was sentenced to die for slitting the throat of his 14-month-old stepson in 2000 during a standoff with police.